on Greg Delanty

Witnessing tears break in her face
You discovered the magic, the black magic
Of your words, no magic could take back.

Why isn't Greg Delanty, the transgressive magician of 'Thrust & Parry', one of our most celebrated poets? In part it must be a question of provenance, or of province: Delanty, though hailing from Cork, lives and works in the US. His work, too, is neither characteristically Irish, British nor American. This isn't to say that the usual concerns are missing: there are poems of place, nature, family. In a Collected Poems, even one as tightly edited as this, there's an inevitable thematic line from the more abstracted rehearsals of Cast in the Fire and Southward - 'A highdiving gannet opens any point / in the water and a circle radiates out, / verifying that every point is the centre' ('An Oil Spillage') - to The Ship of Birth (2003) and the unpublished Aceldama, both resonant with not only the birth of a son but the diagnosis and death from cancer of a mother.

Yet Delanty remains resolutely sui generis. Recently, in Poetry Review 96:3, David Morley celebrated Delanty's 'wordy bravura'. And this stylishness conjures more than mere shadow - play out of each poem. Among the best examples are the 'print - ing' poems from 1998's